


FAQ

by ancientreader



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 07:19:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary's dead, John's a single parent, and Sherlock has not the faintest notion what to do with a baby.</p>
            </blockquote>





	FAQ

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleetwood_mouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetwood_mouse/gifts).



Mycroft himself is in the car he sends for John, which also, of course, Mycroft being Mycroft and leaving no room for argument, includes a properly secured infant seat. The driver engages the gears only after John has got Louisa situated.

“Sherlock is not permitted to tell you where he was, even if he has deduced it.”

John nods.

“Although he will be at large, he is not quite at liberty. There will be no cases from the Met for the foreseeable future.”

This is even more impossible to answer than the previous statement, so John doesn’t try. They travel in silence except for Louisa’s burbling over her array of colored blocks on a rope. Fifteen minutes on, the car’s quiet hum has sent her to sleep. John watches the roads pass in wordless suspense.

* 

Even tricksy Jim Moriarty couldn’t fake blowing his brains out through the roof of his mouth: he was dead as dead can be. So there was a second clever, self-amused, ultimately tiresome criminal to be brought down; Sherlock avoided that one-way trip to Central Europe; and Mycroft was enabled to make Charles Augustus Magnussen’s killing — legally if not morally a murder — go away.

But incompletely, and not at once. Nearly eight months have passed since that stupid jokey farewell on the tarmac. 

 

*

They head south, all the way to Gatwick, as if Sherlock might have been near the airport, or have just been flown in: so John will be meant to think. The driver turns off the A23 onto a series of side roads eventually paralleling Riverside Garden Park. A Land Rover with tinted windows is parked on the verge; they stop so smoothly that John can’t distinguish the last moment of motion from the first moment without. The rear driver’s-side door of the Land Rover opens and Sherlock appears, looking like a posh waiter in neat black trousers and a white shirt. John fights back bile. There’s no penciled-in mustache, at least. Sherlock's hair has been cut shorter than he normally wears it. His expression is calm but his eyes never once leave Mycroft’s car and his hands remain behind his back. He’s stilling them, or anyway keeping them out of sight.

John doesn’t know whether he should open the door and get out, or — But Mycroft resolves the problem by getting out himself without a glance at John; the driver shuts the door behind him and stays where he is. Okay, John can sit tight. He’s good at that, isn’t he?

There is a brief exchange during which neither brother’s demeanor alters, and then Mycroft walks to the Land Rover; Sherlock hesitates, squares his shoulders, walks briskly to the car with John in it, and gets in.

God, he’s so tall. He’s enormous next to Louisa. Of course he is, he’s an adult male of greater than average height, what would he be next to a seven-month-old but enormous? John can’t move.

“Thank you for coming,” Sherlock says.

“I – Yeah, of course, Sherlock, how was I going to not — This is Louisa.” For the sound of the car door opening and closing the second time has woken her, and she’s staring at the new entrant into Car World.

“Yes,” says Sherlock. He is watching Louisa just as she watches him. “Does one say hello?”

“Sure, say hello. Talk to her. Er. If you want.” John’s letting the baby handle this, because he certainly can’t.

Sherlock nods. “Hello,” he says to Louisa, in a polite voice John has never heard him use, genuinely, with anyone. He even extends his hand to her. 

“Ah!” she says, and thrusts the blocks-on-a-rope at him. When Sherlock reaches for it, she snatches it back and bursts out laughing. 

Sherlock looks nonplussed — embarrassed, even; he withdraws his hand, blinking.

“It’s a game,” John offers. “She points the toy at you, you reach for it, she says, ‘Not so fast, mate.’”

Sherlock nods at this but doesn’t reengage Louisa directly, only watches her, worrying at his lower lip and saying nothing. She proffers the blocks-on-a-rope a few more times, then gives up and returns to chewing on them. 

John’s heart sinks. This is going to be awful. The air in the car feels insufficient; he concentrates on breathing through the sensation. Not that he would have imagined Sherlock falling neatly into avuncularity — He doesn’t know what he would have imagined; in any event, it now seems that the future will consist of Sherlock slipping farther and farther away from him. “Impossible to carry on a conversation,” Sherlock might remark. Bored, sneering. 

John must not resent Louisa. He must not resent Sherlock, who’s not to blame, is he?, for finding ordinary human interaction so difficult.

This silence is far worse than the silence of suspicion and antagonism that lies between himself and Mycroft. Louisa provides some distraction by starting to whimper and fuss at her mouth; John fishes a frozen bun out of the keep-cool pouch he stashed it in and she settles in gumming it. “Teething,” he tells Sherlock.

Nod. Silence.

They are nearly to Baker Street when Sherlock speaks at last. “I,” he begins. Stops, looks down, starts again: “I was shown photographs of the scene.”

John stifles the impulse to cover Louisa’s ears, but Sherlock of course sees him flinch and makes a face. “For goodness’ sake, I’m not intending to say anything untoward, not that her linguistic capacity could possibly — No. Never mind that. Mycroft won’t have troubled himself to tell you, and you might wish to know. The photographs were taken after the infant was removed from the scene, of course, but otherwise the — arrangement of items — was untouched. I thought perhaps it might be helpful to know that the pushchair was so positioned that she would not have seen the … events.”

“Oh,” is all John can think to say and, a moment later, “Thank you. That’s — a relief. Yeah.”

And then they are at Baker Street and the driver is gliding to an impossibly smooth stop and Sherlock is nodding goodbye and climbing out of the car, and the car is moving, again impossibly smoothly, and soon John and Louisa are in Clapham again, and it’s as if Sherlock had never been near him at all. 

*

Then silence, for the next several days. 

John tries, as he has been trying for months, not to wonder where Sherlock is or what he may be doing. Wondering, supposing, speculating – these are to be avoided. 

To the extent possible.

One line of speculation that John can’t quite make himself avoid goes like this:

Suppose Mary had shot Magnussen that night, or shot no one at all, instead of shooting _her friend Sherlock_ : she might not now be dead, and Sherlock might not have spent many months in solitary confinement, and John … A blank wall, for where John might be.

He can’t be sure Mary would be alive, of course. She might have been run down by a motorbike, or eaten salmonella-tainted beef, or flung herself into the Thames in an access of postpartum depression. Such events are unusual, but they happen. 

In a much more unusual sequence of events, the sequence that actually occurred, a former assassin allows her blackmailer to live; instead, she puts out of commission her friend who is one of probably two people in the world with the skills to spot a threat from her past and protect her from it; this friend winds up himself killing the blackmailer, narrowly escapes an informal oh-let-the-Central-European-gangs-take-care-of-it death sentence, and then is incarcerated for several months; meanwhile, the threat creeps closer and closer and closer until one fine morning it’s only the distance of a knife blade away. So “Mary Morstan Watson” bled out, a month ago, in an alley in Woolwich, with baby Louisa in her pushchair twenty feet away, wailing. 

John supposes that it was simply too much trouble to kill Louisa as well, and that this is why he is sitting on a bench in Clapham Common now with a (new) pushchair beside him that is occupied by a live baby.

Once upon a time Sherlock didn’t even understand why someone might feel distress over a long-dead infant, but he has learned many things since then. John tries not to think about Sherlock’s emotional passages over the past several years, because when he does think about them he suspects that Sherlock is lying about the position of the pushchair, for John’s sake.

These are, approximately, the limits to what John lets himself imagine, surmise, suspect. Occasionally, despite his best efforts, he admits something or other to himself, too: for example, he had not forgiven Mary, he could never have forgiven Mary no matter what pretty stories Sherlock told him, and if his abrupt widowhood hadn’t ended their marriage, then divorce would have done the job not much later. 

Supposing, suspecting, admitting: luxuries. John’s parental leave was followed almost without a break by his bereavement leave. “Bereaved,” though, isn’t exactly what he feels (see: “he could never have forgiven Mary,” above). He loves Louisa. He is exhausted. He misses Baker Street. (Admission.)

*

Louisa half wakes, fretting. John singsongs, “Hmm, mmm, baby girl,” trying to make his voice rumbly-rhythmic the way she seems to find soothing; he scoops her up and offers her some mashed carrot and apple. She’s progressed this month to eating it with lumpy bits in, which she gums enthusiastically. John cradles her against his chest, making the paper in his inside breast pocket crinkle. (Exhausted.) He’s not used to any of this. (To offering himself to someone’s need for affection.) (Mary’s touch had been flirtatious and perhaps insincere. That made things easier. Louisa is never insincere.) He hadn’t thought he and Mary would have a baby so soon. It wasn’t supposed to be easy for a woman her age to fall pregnant. “Let’s not look a gift baby in the mouth,” she said, and he agreed. That’s what a man was supposed to do — a happily married man who wanted a baby, that is. 

At least he doesn’t have to sort out custody arrangements. It’s something Sherlock would say: “Look on the bright side, John. At least you haven’t got to work out custody arrangements with a not-so-retired assassin.” And John would frown, and Sherlock would say, “Not good?,” and John would say, “Bit not good, yeah,” but inside he would be agreeing.

Because it would have been tricky, trying to share custody with someone he didn’t trust any further than he could see her.

Louisa, sated, pushes away the rest of the food. John packs it up and burps her; thankfully nothing but air emerges, and she falls asleep again. 

Soon she’ll do something horrible in her nappy. John rocks her a bit longer, till she’s deep under, then replaces her in the pushchair. The papers crinkle again as he shifts. Something from Sherlock. 

*

Sherlock visited that morning, unannounced but timing his arrival for just when John has gotten Louisa fed and clean and dressed and has finally sat down with a cup of coffee. He must, John thinks, be spying on them — or, more likely, Mycroft spies, and relays the information. John doesn’t really mind; the attention makes him feel less lonely. (Another admission. Today seems to be full of them; he’s going to have to watch it, if he wants to stay in the safe haven of loving Louisa and feeling exhausted and nothing more. Which he does.)

Anyway, it was a brief visit. The first time he has seen Sherlock since that awful silent drive back to London eight days ago. Sherlock swept in, glanced at Louisa in her high chair, drank a swig of John’s coffee, said, “There are swans in Regent’s Park, you know. You might bring your daughter there,” handed John two stapled-together sheets of A4 paper, and swept out again. 

What the hell was that about, anyway? Regent’s Park is the other side of the Thames and miles away. Maybe Sherlock has a thing about swans, or there’s a case, or — but even Sherlock has to realize that John wouldn’t, couldn’t, bring Louisa along on a case, doesn’t he?

He must, or he wouldn’t have been at such pains to assure John that the pushchair had been turned away from Mary’s murder. — Anyway, no, Mycroft said no cases for now. Maybe forever? 

Having been left with half a cup of coffee and a couple of sheets of paper, John got up, tucked the sheets into his breast pocket without looking at them, and finished getting Louisa ready to go out. 

It’s painful, how good she smells to him, how his eyes prickle when she burrows against him. When at the same time she embodies the truth that everything else he ever wanted is gone.

*

Now, reminded by the crinkling, John figures he may as well see what Sherlock thought was so important that he paid the first personal call since his release to deliver it. John pulls the sheets of paper out, unfolds them, and sits baffled. 

The two sheets comprise a printout from the website of something called the Swan Sanctuary — the Frequently Asked Questions page, to be precise. Jesus, Sherlock really must have a thing for big white birds with swoopy necks and a reputation for aggressiveness. 

John reads down the list without much interest: _What can I feed swans? Can swans be overfed? Is it normal for a swan to fold one of its legs up onto its back?_

Yes, the Swan Sanctuary assures its readers, it is normal. 

There! Sherlock is a swan. The thought almost makes John smile. 

Then: 

> _Q. The nesting female has disappeared/been killed — should anything be done?  
>  A. No. The male will take over the nesting process and is quite capable of rearing the cygnets alone._  
> 

And:

> _Q. There's a swan's nest in a really vulnerable location — what can be done?  
>  A. … If the nest is vulnerable to natural events such as high tides  & floodwater then it should be left alone so that the swans can learn from the experience — if a young couple lose a nest under these circumstances then they will learn not to build a nest so low down the next year. Sad as it is, they have to be allowed to learn from natural experiences._

Yes, it’s very sad (okay: lancinatingly painful), but John isn’t sure what he’s meant to have learned from the error he made in nesting in a vulnerable location, or whether some principle of noninterference applied but was not explained to him. 

As he is thinking this over, Sherlock appears from somewhere and sits on the bench beside him. Sherlock taking an interest in swans is moderately surprising; Sherlock silently and suddenly manifesting, much less so. That’s one lesson John has learned from long association with the brothers Holmes. “Nice to know male swans can be competent parents,” he says.

“Something to bear in mind.”

John nods several times: acknowledging, not agreeing. _The male is quite capable of rearing the cygnets alone._ Christ. Sherlock must be blind or joking. John’s barely capable of keeping himself and Louisa fed and dry. Perhaps that’s all that’s required. It better be. No, he’s not keeping it together at all, and he proves it to himself in the next moment, because what comes out of his mouth though he’s not even aware that he’s thinking it is this:

“Do you think she ever loved me?” (Jesus. Is he six? Of all the childish, feeble things to wonder — ) (Too late now; there’s a sensation of crowding in his brain, in his mouth. Fucking swans.)

Sherlock visibly tries to produce a lie and visibly fails. “I don’t know.” He has clasped his hands in his lap, a gesture John has seen often enough to recognize it as his means of preventing himself from rubbing his legs: substituting, for a glaring tell, one that is merely obvious. 

“Because how could she love me and shoot you, that’s the trouble I have.”

“I explained at the time — ”

“No, don’t. I went along with that line because I didn’t know what else to do. I figured you had something in mind, some idea for how to — Never mind, you missed — Sorry.”

“I missed all of it, yes.”

So it wasn’t noninterference, at least. Just — just human error. John’s hands are shaking, slightly. He can control it. He takes a cue from Sherlock, so now both of them are sitting with their hands clasped in their laps, like polite schoolboys. Looking straight ahead. John casts about. 

“Swans.” _Voice a little creaky, there, Watson._ “It’s, uh, exactly the kind of thing you used to delete.”

What made him think that was going to come off as lighthearted ribbing? He can hear it himself, what it sounds like. What he sounds like: someone far away from — the past. From good things. 

“Ah. Well. You know that, being … closely held … I was not permitted use of the Internet. But — ”

_— the sick swooping freefall, John’s face still stinging from Magnussen’s finger flicks, the helicopters so close over them he could probably have seen Mycroft’s face if the searchlights hadn’t blinded him; Sherlock shouting at him to stand back, stand away —_ so they don’t shoot you too, _Sherlock didn’t say; the knowledge that Sherlock fully expected to be killed on the spot —_

“John?”

John’s heart pounds. Give him a war zone and he’s fine, but not this, not the memory of Sherlock lost to him again —

Sherlock is looking at him carefully. “ _John._ It’s all right, you know. Once it became apparent that summary execution wasn’t on the cards, what ensued was — lonely, no more than that. There was no intention to drive me mad; it was hoped that I would be useful again, someday. Even if — in exile, and briefly.” Sherlock smiles. John doesn’t. Sherlock presses his lips together, frowning. “And then after — after my brief exile, I _was_ useful, so it became clear to everyone that sooner or later Mycroft would be able to engineer my release. … John?”

“No, go — go on. I want to hear.”

“I was provided ample reading matter. In the interest of preserving my sanity, you see. Medical books, hard copies of various journals, a DVD of the _Encyclopædia Britannica._ And — ” Sherlock swallows so hard that even among the ambient noises of the park, John can hear his throat click. John flexes his right fist once, twice. Louisa stirs in the pushchair, stretches, opens her eyes wide, then closes them again. There’s a nappy change in John’s near future, it seems.

“I was also given news of you from time to time,” Sherlock continues. His eyes are on Louisa. “And as I was alone I sometimes … diverted myself by recalling conversations we had had. Do you remember how appalled you were, once, that I knew nothing of the solar system?”

“Yeah.” John has to say it twice, not having managed to voice the word on the first try.

“I thought, if — if we had the opportunity to meet again” (Sherlock says this all in a rush) “that I might, might surprise you, by demonstrating a knowledge of astronomy.” 

John is taking long slow breaths through his nose, with pauses between so he doesn’t hyperventilate. His face is set, he can tell, the way it sets without his conscious intent, just before he hits someone.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says. “I never do get this right, amusing you at our reunions, I mean. I should — should I go? What am I to do, John, tell me.”

Both of them are gazing determinedly at the baby now; if she weren’t there, John thinks, they’d have to fetch a large rock to watch, or one of them would have to bolt as Sherlock is now suggesting, or perhaps they would both fix their attention on some third party: Jim, maybe, or the woman known as Mary. What they’ve always done, to avoid looking toward each other. 

“No, don’t —” 

Louisa makes an effortful face and sustains the expression. 

“She needs changing,” John says. “Don’t — Just, wait, will you?”

But Sherlock does better than wait: while John tucks the fresh nappy under Louisa and wipes her bum, he steadies her on the bench with one hand and offers her a finger to pull with the other. His expression is so intent that John thinks to ask whether he needs a change as well, but before he can speak, Sherlock crooks up the corner of his mouth and says, almost camp: “Noooo.” 

Clean and dry, Louisa nestles in John’s lap, waving her fists. How much nicer it would be for her, he thinks, if someone with a softer body were to cuddle her. Only not an assassin, of course. Sherlock used to call himself a sociopath, which seems hilarious in retrospect. At least, theoretically it’s hilarious; in practice, to think about it only hurts. “Where’d you learn about nappy changes, then? YouTube, like the serviettes?” 

It’s been a very, very long time since either of them even alluded to the wedding in the presence of the other. 

Sherlock shrugs, gives one quick nod. 

He’s been out of custody for a week. One week. Sherlock Holmes has had access to the Internet for seven — no, all right, eight — days, after being incarcerated without it for seven and a half months interrupted only by the shortest plane flight ever made that did not end in disaster, and he has spent some of the time on YouTube _watching videos about nappy changing._

John grabs for a handhold in the conversation. Not the wedding, not — Yes. Astronomy. Right. “Okay, astronomy. Impress away.”

“Ah. Well, the truth is I found myself derailed from it, rather. I happened across the _Britannica_ ’s entry for the constellation Cygnus. I was struck by the cognitive process behind the whole notion of constellations, something I don’t believe I had ever considered before outside the context of a case: that is to say, the human propensity to imagine that things make sense. To … perceive order where there isn’t any; when the stars that make up a constellation are so distant from one another as to have no physical relationship at all. Unless one counts, oh, an exchange of photons.” 

Unexpectedly to himself, John does smile. “That’s your idea of something to amuse me with at our reunion? A discussion of cognitive error?”

Apparently Sherlock is simultaneously riding a train of thought involving John’s adequacy as a parent, which momentarily pulls ahead of the train bearing Sherlock’s analysis of his reading whilst incarcerated. He says: “She’s more than content, you know. In your lap. You’ve only to observe her body language; she’s nearly burbling.” 

For some reason, for no reason, it’s as if Sherlock has pulled a wire and another wire and touched the two wires together: “What, a week ago you couldn’t play a game with her, now you’re an expert on baby body language?”

“I’ve been making it my business to learn — ”

“For Christ’s sake, why? You don’t — you’re not — ”

“Oh,” Sherlock snaps, “you’re very sure of what I don’t and what I’m not.”

Louisa, picking up on the tension, whimpers. ( _John Watson, successful father, making his tiny daughter cry._ ) ( _Sherlock’s no bloody help, either_ , John thinks, mutinous against his own self-laceration.) John rocks her, meaning to soothe, but he’s fast and abrupt and jagged with anger, and not five seconds have gone by before she is wailing full bore. _Shit, shit, shit_. He gets up, looking away from Sherlock, and walks back and forth, forcing himself to amble, to slow his breathing, to hum at her. He fishes his keys out of his pocket and encourages her into the proffer-and-grab game until finally she forgets her distress.

When John next looks toward the bench, Sherlock is bowed with his head in his hands. 

_Nearly eight months of solitary confinement and this is what he comes back to: you, his best friend, the biggest arsehole in London._

“I’m — sorry, Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m just — not used to being seen through like that any more. Sherlock …”

Sherlock lifts his head out of his hands and gives John a chin-pulled-in look of skepticism, but lets the lie stand, if it is a lie. “Will you sit down again?” is all he says. 

Sherlock’s hands are back in his lap and John watches them. Their architecture at rest, the tiny scars from cuts and burns accumulated over a lifetime of chemical experimentation much of which has been conducted with more urgency and eagerness than care. A record of Sherlock’s desire to know. How far apart are he and Sherlock really? Perhaps the tether John imagines between them is just that: imagined. He feels his throat close. Sherlock’s glance flicks toward him and away. 

John registers suddenly that Sherlock is paler than he used to be. “You weren’t allowed outdoors, were you?” 

The look downward, the pressed-together lips, the shake of the head. So things were worse than just “lonely.” Or maybe “lonely” was worse than Sherlock is letting on. 

“You were talking about Cygnus,” John suggests.

“Oh. Yes. … It may not be of much interest. I don’t think — it’s perhaps not always obvious to me how these things are accounted. An arrangement of letters with many significances, all in … sidelong relationships with one another. The constellation. The taxonomic _Cygnus_. There were mythological figures, not all spelled the same way, an artifact of transliteration of course ... Among those was one known for imposing on his — his friend, a series of cruelties … The ultimate result was not a happy one.”

John’s exquisitely aware of the bench under him, of the warmth and small movements of Louisa in his lap. Of the air all around, of vastness into which a person might float away forever. He pets at Louisa’s head and bends to smell her. “Who do you think is the cruel one, then?”

Sherlock tilts his head, right, left. “In one version of the story, the injured friend at last abandons the cruel friend, who then gives way to despair. So the cruel friend perhaps never intended to drive the injured friend away. Perhaps the cruelties arose from misjudgments, after all.”

John’s throat locks down tight. At the edge of his vision he can just see Sherlock bring his hands to his mouth and then take them away again. “Yeah, okay,” John finally manages. “That seems — yeah, that’s probably what happened.”

Quietly but clearly, and without hesitation, as if he has been waiting for this moment, Sherlock says: “Come home, John. Please. Would you like to come home?”

And it’s ridiculous, but there’s an interval during which John can’t parse this: “Come home,” what does that mean — “Go home”? Go back to his flat? But it’s a fine day, Louisa is happy, why —

_Oh._

The longing doesn’t so much wash over John as fall on him, as in that cartoon some Americans introduced him to in Afghanistan, the old one with the fast clever lucky bird and his would-be predator, the inept coyote, whose schemes always ended in his falling a long way, or exploding, or having an anvil marked “1 TON” drop on his head. John’s homesickness is huge and crushing to the point of absurdity. He should laugh, so he produces a dry sound as a substitute for a laugh: “Ha,” he says, “that’s a good one, a baby at Baker Street” — and can’t go on.

Sherlock is digging in his coat pocket. “Yes,” he says, “look, John,” and in the flat of his hand is a white plastic object that resolves itself into —

— a socket cover.

“There’s a refrigerator with a lock, for specimens. And gates — ”

John folds up. He folds up over Louisa in his lap, and it seems his entire upper body is convulsing, but this can’t be crying because his eyes are dry; no, it’s just that he’s disassembling right here on this bench on Clapham Common, and he can’t seem to stop, not even when, dimly, he becomes aware that Sherlock’s arms have drawn themselves around him.

The question that is missing from the Swan Sanctuary’s FAQ page is the most complicated one, and it goes like this:

> _What happens when you have lost the one you did not recognize as your mate? And what happens if, after a series of catastrophes, he is restored? And what do you do when you learn that, as soon as he possibly could, he has made a home for you?_

With Louisa tucked against him, John turns toward Sherlock and, for dear life, holds on.

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for fleetwood_mouse on the occasion of her birthday, to her prompt "Cygnus." Happy birthday, fleetwood; you're an ornament to the fandom! I was, um, a little eager, so I posted pretty much as soon as it was June 28 anywhere in the world. 
> 
> This was originally supposed to be a 221B, but I forgot that little detail while I was writing. Oopsie.
> 
> All but one of the FAQs are quoted directly from [the website of the Swan Sanctuary](http://www.theswansanctuary.org.uk/faq.php); the last is, of course, John's own. The cruel friend whose story Sherlock tells is sometimes Cygnus, more often Cycnus, if Wikipedia is to be believed. A fuller account is [here](http://www.mythindex.com/greek-mythology/C/Cycnus.html).
> 
> Pity my poor betas, [TSylvestris](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/profile) and [Chryse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Chryse/profile). If I have ever changed a diaper in my life, I have repressed the memory, so thank goodness for knowledgeable friends. And for YouTube.


End file.
